The trauma of seeking asylum in the U.S. during the Trump era 4b6eo
Lorena Arroyo and Inés García Ramos
In January of 2019 and in violation of laws, agreements and regulations, the U.S. government established the Migrant Protection Protocols, a policy that forces asylum applicants to wait for their cases in the most dangerous Mexican cities on the U.S. border. The policy, still in place, reinforces the legacy of fear and trauma instilled in Donald Trump’s istration. In his four years in office and without congressional approval, he has destroyed immigration policies built by the last nine presidents. 5u3d2w
This project was ed by the International Women's Media Foundation and the Carter Center. This project includes images of violence.
Armando, a 10-year-old Honduran boy, sits before an immigration official in Brownsville, Texas. He tells the official he and his father were kidnapped twice in Mexico. One time in Villahermosa, in the state of Tabasco. Men who said they were policemen turned them over to criminals, who stole everything they had and let them go.
The second time was in Monterrey, in Nuevo León. A hooded man put the barrel of an assault rifle to his head and a cell phone to his ear to ask his mother in Houston to pay the $5,000 ransom. Meanwhile, they tortured his father in front of him.
“He told the official it was something he would never forget. An adult is accustomed to seeing that, but a child … He couldn't see a Mexican policeman without fear. He would shake. It was traumatic,” said Armando's 37-year-old father, Damián.*
Damián and his son ran away from San Lorenzo, a community more than 100 miles south of Tegucigalpa, in June 2019. He left to avoid reprisals from gang after he refused to hand over his son to sell drugs on the street. He also dreamed of applying for asylum in the United States and reuniting with his wife and their baby girl, who was just 18 months old when mother and daughter fled the same violence three years ago.
But the road to a reunion would not be quick or simple. On Aug. 18 2019, after the two kidnappings, they crossed the Rio Grande with the help of smugglers. Waiting for them on the other side were the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP).
“When we were going to cross, we were walking through the woods and my son saw a huge U.S. flag and he told me, 'Daddy, that's Texas. That's where my little sister is.' But they told us, 'No, you're going back again, you're going to Mexico.' He was very disappointed. It was very traumatic.”
Nearly 70,000 others have been returned to Mexico, like Damián and Armando, without any protection for their rights. They were left homeless, in makeshift campgrounds, on the street or in shelters that receive no assistance at all from the
Mexican government.
In the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, the migrants are still being expelled to the other side of the wall. With the presidential election almost here, asylum seekers are hoping for a reopening of the border and the repair of an immigration system build over 50 years of both Republican and Democratic governments – and destroyed by Trump through executive orders in barely four years.
The MPP were put into effect in January 2019, during the istration of then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who portrayed them as a way to stop “the immigration crisis on the border.”
During the previous months, more than 60,000 migrants, most of them Central Americans, had surrendered voluntarily to the Border Patrol – an unprecedented move.
Detentions along the border 1d2g1l
The arrests are of people who try to enter the United States without documents. At the time of their arrest, some request legal protections available, such as asylum.
Fiscal year 2018 ended with 20 percent more arrests than FY2017.
The first record of detained families, 23,121, was recorded in
November 2018.
January 2019: the first asylum applicants are returned to Mexico.
March 2019: There's a spike in the number of Central Americans who surrender voluntarily to Border Patrol agents and ask for asylum. The majority are families.
June 2019: Under pressure, Mexico agrees to try to halt the flow of Central Americans heading for the U.S. border. It deploys the National Guard to 11 municipalities along the border.
July 2019: The OIM coordinates flights and buses, financed by the U.S. government, to return migrants under MPP to their own countries.
March 2020: The United States and Mexico agree to close their shared border because of the pandemic.
April 2020: Due to the Coronavirus, the United States starts expedited deportations. In some cases, migrants are deported in less than two hours.
Migrants who reached the U.S. side of the border and could show in an interview that they had a “credible fear of persecution” were detained for a period and then free while a judge considered their case. But the process went forward while they remained in U.S. territory.
That all ended Jan. 24 2019, when Nielsen wrote a memo
directing that all Salvadorans, Hondurans and Guatemalans – with the exception of unaccompanied minors, pregnant women and people with pre-existing conditions – who wanted to obtain asylum should remain in Mexico for the duration of their legal process, which could be months and
even years.
When they were scheduled for an immigration court appearance, they were to show up at a border crossing and remain in the custody of U.S. officials. At the end of the day, most of them were to be returned to Mexico to wait for their next court date.
“Aliens trying to game the system to get into our country illegally will no longer be able to disappear into the United States, where many skip their court dates. Instead, they will wait for an immigration court decision while they are in Mexico” Nielsen declared. “‘Catch and release' will be replaced by 'catch and return.'”
The Trump istration, in an unprecedented shift, put the Nielsen memo into effect and continued to demolish the asylum system. That was the way it tried to close what it viewed as a “legal loophole” in the system. It was part of the wall against migrants thrown up under pressure from Stephen Miller, a White House aide and architect of Trump's immigration policies.
Key attacks on the asylum system 3a2b3n
With the MPP in force, the Central Americans were left in limbo, waiting in border cities with high crime rates. The first city where it was applied was Tijuana, in Baja California.
Almudena Toral/univision
In August 2019, the morgue in Tijuana was overwhelmed. It was receiving 15 to 40 bodies per day, bodies with 30 or 40 gunshots, with fractured skulls, strangled or beheaded. During that period, the number of victims shot dead and then dismembered rose by up to 50 percent, according to Cesar Gonzalez Vaca, head of the Forensic Medical Service in Baja California.
Three criminal groups were fighting for control of street sales of drugs like crystal meth in the area: the brothers Arellano Félix cartel; the Sinaloa cartel; and the Jalisco Nueva Generación.
“Tijuana went from being a supplier to a consumer of drugs as well. That's the problem we have right now. Ninety percent of the victims are linked to drug trafficking,” said Tijuana Police Chief Ricardo Guerrero. “They fight in the streets, on the corners, where
they sell.”
And the violence is not only against the drug sellers, but against consumers as well. “If you go and buy from the guy in the corner, who's from the other side, well you're attacked too because you did not buy from them. It is a super complex problem.”
A seizure of crystal meth in Tijuana. The police arrested a young man in the street carrying the sports bag. They found the drug while searching the bag. Almudena Toral/Univision
A car searched by Tijuana Police after a traffic accident. They found drugs in small bags in the driver’s side door. Almudena Toral/Univision
Funeral company employees carry a body from the Tijuana morgue to a van. Coroners have been overwhelmed in recent years by an increase in homicides. “We have many bodies coming with heavy-caliber bullets, traumatic blows, knife wounds as causes of death,” says César Augusto González Vaca, director of the Baja California coroner’s office. Almudena Toral/Univision
A room in the morgue where family seeking their loved ones can go through a book of photos of unidentified bodies. In June, 2019, 619 unidentified bodies were sent to a mass grave. Almudena Toral/Univision
Tijuana Police Commander Ricardo Guerrero is in charge of the night shift in the city. “A person who leaves his country is already a victim. This is a new problem for the Tijuana Police. Here, they are targets for criminal groups, for human-traffcking, prostitution, for gangs, organized crime, for street-level drug sales.” Almudena Toral/Univision
The outside of a club in the north of Tijuana, an area of prostitution, crime and drugs. Almudena Toral/Univision
A Tijuana police officer stands guard on the street while his colleagues search cars. Almudena Toral/Univision
A police officer makes a call while an ambulance crew attends to a patient who was shot in the head. In 2018, Tijuana was classified as the most violent city in the world by the Citizens Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice. Almudena Toral/Univision
Guerrero explained that's how migrants in Tijuana wind up “as victims” of people smugglers and drug sellers who also could offer
them jobs.
That's the broad outline of the brutal violence lashing most of the places where the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has applied the MPP. They are places where the U.S. Department of States sometimes even warns against travel there.
Where is MPP in force? 235m6n
As of September 2020, TRAC reported 67,790 people had been sent under MPP to some of the most dangerous cities along the Mexican border with the United States
Tijuana 1c2p4r
Start: January 2019
Homicide rate*: 114.05
Mexicali r4822
Start: March 2019
Homicide rate*: 12.81
Nogales 2d6e
Start: January 2019
Homicide rate*: 34.74
Ciudad Juárez 8b1q
Start: March 2019
Homicide rate*: 88.81
Nuevo Laredo 49394v
Start: January 2020
Homicide rate*: 12.18
Matamoros 6mo3i
Start: July 2019
Homicide rate*: 14.39
Piedras Negras 356z6l
Start: October 2019
Homicide rate*: 8.56
Source: Citizens Council on Public Security and Penal Justice, 2019
And Tijuana, ranked as the world's most violent city in 2018 by the Citizens Council on Public Security and Penal Justice, was considered the safest city among the seven where migrants were sent under MPP.
That's where two Honduran teenagers who traveled with one of the so-called migrant caravans were beaten, strangled and tortured to death by local criminals. Authorities found their naked bodies on this street, wrapped in bedsheets, the night of Dec. 15 of that year.
Little by little, DHS began expanding the MPP to almost anyone who applied for asylum, not just Central Americans. It added Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Cubans, Brazilian, Colombians, some Africans and even some Mexicans (who represent 0.14 percent of the total). It reached agreements later with El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala to receive some of the returned asylum applicants – even though most of the migrants seeking protection in the United States came precisely from those three countries, long buffeted by gang violence and poverty.
Up to May 2020, the organization Human Rights First had recorded 1,114 crimes against asylum applicants who were returned to Mexican border cities to await rulings on
their cases.
That number included murders, rapes, kidnappings, tortures and thefts. And 265 were kidnappings and attempted kidnappings involving children. The real numbers are surely higher, because not all the victims dare to file official complaints.
Those crimes and the long road to asylum under MPP have generated trauma and psychological damages among the migrants.
The uncertainty grew after March 2020, when the U.S. government decided to close the border because of the Coronavirus, paralyzing the court hearings for migrants waiting in Mexico. In April, there was a substantial drop in the number of migrants returned to Mexico by the Border Patrol, but the numbers spiked to 1,167 people in September, an 80 percent increase from April.
Sent to Mexico
following the start
of the Coronavirus
emergency
Migrants returned under MPP
2,500
2,000
1,500
1,000
500
0
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Source: CBP
Sent to Mexico following the start
of the Coronavirus emergency
Migrants returned under MPP
2,500
2,000
1,500
1,000
500
0
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Source: CBP
On Oct. 19 of this year, as some cities were preparing for a reopening of the border, acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf announced an extension of the border closing until Nov. 21 because of the Coronavirus.
“With the border closed, the atmosphere here is tense, sad, and many times frustrating. Psychologically it is an irreparable damage. It is a damage that no one will ever forget. It is something that is traumatizing,” Damián said in July, shortly before the first coronavirus case was confirmed in the Matamoros campground. He had been directed to the camp, like hundreds of other migrants who depend on humanitarian assistance to live in border cities because of the MPP.
By the time the long wait at the border was made worse by the pandemic and an attempt to kidnap his son in the Matamoros campground, Damián had already made a painful decision.
Almudena Toral/Univision
He was one of the first among hundreds of parents who accepted an option they saw as desperate but the safest for their children: They sent them to cross the border alone – defined by U.S. officials as unaccompanied alien children (UAC) – so they could be processed and reunited with relatives already in the United States. In Armando's case it was Houston, where his mother lives.
Eight parents interviewed by Univision Noticias at the migrant camp in the border city of Matamoros took a desperate step. They told their small children to turn themselves in at U.S. border stations, so that they would be allowed into the United States as unaccompanied minors. Almudena Toral/Univision
Alexandra hugs the stuffed animals that her 5- and 6-year-old children left behind. In November, 2019, she sent them over the international bridge that connects Matamoros, Mexico, with Brownsville, Texas, so that they could turn themselves in to immigration authorities. Almudena Toral/Univision
Aurora escaped from El Salvador with her 16-year-old son after gangs tried to recruit him as a drug dealer. On October 4, 2019, after months of waiting in Matamoros, she said goodbye to her son. She hoped that the authorities would accept him and would send him to live with a brother of hers who lives in Texas. After that, she would return home. “I would rather save my son’s life than have him be snatched away. It’s very tough.” Almudena Toral/Univision
Carolina, a 29-year-old Honduran mother, sent her 12-year-old son to turn himself in at the border station in Brownsville on November 4, 2019. By then, the family had spent three months in Matamoros. They had lost hope that the United States would grant them asylum. Almudena Toral/Univision
Some toys that Carolina kept. The Honduran mother’s plan was for her son to be reunited with his sister, who has been living in the United States for 19 years. “My son doesn’t know her, but she is dying to see him because she always kept making video calls.” Almudena Toral/Univision
Walter sent his daughter, 17, to the United States at the end of October, 2019, hoping that she would be released to her brother, who lives in Florida. According to him, both survived a kidnapping in Mexico. Almudena Toral/Univision
This is the spot at which Damián last saw his son before he was in the hands of American officers. “Do you know how tough it is to see your son leave on that bridge, knowing you’ll probably never see him again?” Almudena Toral/Univision
“When night came, Armando became nervous because he thought it (the kidnapping) could happen again,” Damián said. And the father could not sleep because of the strain. “I come running away from Honduras and I find a country that is the same or worse, more violent than mine. It's not easy, knowing the life of your son is in danger. Only God and my son saw how much I cried in that tent.”
Armando's encounter with the U.S. immigration official would be the beginning of an indefinite separation.
“Any parent you ask will tell you the same thing: that the heart winds up empty, with nothing. He was everything for me. I had to do it because I had no other option, I couldn't do anything. And maybe they (U.S. officials) don't understand that, having to be separated from the person you most love in order to save him,” he lamented in an interview with Univision Noticias shortly after he saw his son cross the border.
The trauma suffered by the asylum applicants under the MPP, sometimes known as “Remain in Mexico,” does not come only from the criminal violence in Tijuana, Matamoros, Nuevo Laredo or any of the other cities where it's in force. There's also the institutional violence suffered by the asylum applicants as they through a procedure that is improvised and has been branded as “inhumane” by immigration lawyers
like Jodi Goodwin.
Daniela Díaz, a 20-year-old Salvadoran, spent 18 months trapped by the MPP. During that time, she developed new fears, like the fear of darkness, because the lights were never completely off during the last 10 months of her confinement in three detention centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Now back in her home after she was deported in September, she often can't sleep until 4 am. She sleeps fitfully because of her nightmares and, she says, because she needs the sleeping pills given to her by a nurse at a detention center during the last five months of her detention. Her mother tries to treat her dependence with chamomile tea. ICE officials deny they distribute such medications
>to detainees.
She also suffers anxiety attacks and stomach pains whenever she sees the ramen soup or spaghetti she had no choice but to eat often in prison.
At the age of 19, Daniela had fled her country because a policeman was harassing her, even entering her home without permission to steal photos of her and threatening to rape and kill her and throw her body in a gully where it would never be found. She was also fleeing a gang member who wanted her for a girlfriend and threatened to kill her after she
rejected him.
U.S. immigration judge. Almudena Toral/Univision
In Tapachula, her first stop in Mexico, she and a girlfriend who ed her on the trip north had to run away when they encountered two gang who knew the girlfriend from El Salvador and took several
shots at them.
Almudena Toral/Univision.
